Today's Multitasking Addiction Is Killing Productivity

Staying On-Task

How to stay focused and on-task

Avoiding the impulse to multitask can be difficult. Many of us today are engaged in collaborative work and we don't want to let down our teams. For workers with many demands on their time and attention, setting goals and planning may not be enough to minimize distractions. Sometimes, more drastic measures are required.

If you can't mute everything, funnel your inbound alerts into a single stream where you can prioritize some and reject others. You can also use apps to help you bundle and channel the noise. A little bit of time spent adjusting notification settings on the worst offenders (e.g., instant messaging) is a worthwhile endeavor. Set aside a few minutes at the top of an hour or every 90 minutes when you check in to see if anything needs immediate attention. For those moments when you need to get into the flow, enforce solitude by silencing notifications entirely.

The chaos of the modern workday creates constant pressure to multitask. We respond to emails during meetings, hold conference calls while driving, and reply to a constant inbound stream of messages while dealing with our workload. From email and chat notifications to the siren song of social media, there is always somewhere else for our minds to wander.

At first glance, this might seem like a good thing. Multitasking makes it possible to kill two birds with one stone, right? You discuss marketing strategy and catch up on your email at the same time. However, research now shows that multitasking is a serious drain on productivity. Rather than doing two things at once, it causes us to do two things badly, and perhaps create more work for ourselves down the road.

In today's fast-moving, always-on office environment, employees and managers alike have to understand the high cost of multitasking. Shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone's productive time. That is a massive sum, and one that can't be ignored. In this slideshow, Andrew Filev, CEO of Wrike, delves deeper into the havoc multitasking can wreak on productivity and what you can do about it.

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